The wait is over: The Hearthstone Open Beta Test is now live in North America! If you haven’t had the chance to partake in all of the crazy card-slinging action yet, now is the perfect chance to start casting powerful spells, summon mighty minions and duel your friends in this fast-paced strategy card game that anyone can dive into right away!

It’s been a crazy past few months for all of us on the Hearthstone team. We announced Hearthstone at PAX East back in March, began the Closed Beta Test in August, had a great Hearthstone event at BlizzCon with the Innkeeper’s Invitational along with our announcements for Android and iPhone support, and now we’re ready to unleash the awesomeness of Hearthstone to you with Open Beta!

So what does this mean for you? If you didn’t get the chance to participate in the Hearthstone Closed Beta Test, now is your chance to download the game! Just click here to download Hearthstone, or you can use the Play Free Now button at the top of playhearthstone.com. We have no plans to perform any more wipes of Hearthstone, so feel free to amass your collection and play against your friends!

What if you don’t play in the North American region? Don’t worry; we plan to go to Open Beta for all of the other regions within the next few days as well, so stay tuned for more information!

As open beta is still a beta phase, we will be closely monitoring many aspects of the game to ensure a positive play experience for everyone. Please be aware that if smoke starts curling out of our servers due to unexpectedly high demand to play Hearthstone, we may have to temporarily disable open beta account activations for a time until we’re ready to take on more players.

HearthPwn - Hearthstone Database, Tools, and News
Now that everyone has access to the Hearthstone Beta, now is a good time to remind you about HearthPwn, our sister site for Hearthstone news! You can find much more frequent Hearthstone news updates there, along with the cards database, deck builder, and decks database.

Visual - View both the picture and all the card information in text form. Gives all the information you could need about the card (including if it can be gold).

Images - View every card in picture form (Great for looking at all the art)

Listing - Simply lists the name, and basic stats. Great for quick browsing.

Filters - We have a filter for every class, type, and attribute there is. We also list the set names and more that you will only find on HearthPwn.

Artist Names - The database also has the name of the artist for each and every card.

Card Flavor Text - Many cards have flavor text, such as "Alexstrasza the Life-Binder brings life and hope to everyone. Except Deathwing. And Malygos. And Nekros."

See Decks That Include Your Favorite Cards - Every card page has both a graph showing how many decks hold that card, along with links to every deck that has that card in it. Find a new fun card, and instantly find decks based off it!

Deck BuilderBuild your deck using the current cards available in Hearthstone or browse some great decks by other players!

people like you deserve a life time ban. In prison. With chains on every arm.

Haters gonna hate, get some more true informations and learn to play before you start crying. If you know this game you would know, that even the hardest legendary can be countered easily. But when you are too retarded for a card game, of course it's pay to win for you.

MMOC, which is actually specifically a WoW fansite, has posted news about games including other Blizzard IPs and other MMOs for a very long time. We have a pretty active Hearthstone forum, so it's safe to say that many of the users here are interested in hearing this announcement. Not everyone will care about 100% of the news 100% of the time; those that don't care about particular bits of information will just have to learn to scroll past it.

There is stuff about other games in the offtopic forum.
Football Manager
TF2
Civilization

Why not keep this non mmo game to the offtopic forum aswell?
That way I can untic my offtopic and not get bothered with this.

Shouldn't the admins follow the forum rules aswell as the rest of us should?

Free 2 Play casual stuff, got bored after 3-4 days and deleted it. Might be interesting for mobile devices as 99% of all the games on iOS/Android are just boring. I guess it's not that bad if you are into card games, otherwise it's a luck-driven game that will cost you a lot of money.

Tell us your deck and why you lost so we can help you improving your play.
Perhaps you are just whining/trolling

Or you can try answering the points he made right into the post you're answering, instead of simply trying to make a fool of him. And btw, having a better deck without playing doesn't make it less unfair and p2w, which was his main point. Of course you can get a better deck, yet it's still easier for paying users to get one, but that was already part of the points he listed. Do you think selling heroic SoO stuff in WoW wouldn't make the game unfair and p2w, because it's also obtainable from other players ?

As a former Beta player and passionate trading card player here is my advice: give Hearthstone a try, the jokes are fun, but don't spent a single coin on it, the game isn't worth paying for at all.

At the beginning you're lured into the game by the fancy and well done graphic and audio quality (and jokes) and the cards and rules are simple to understand. However if you take a closer look at the game, it has nothing to do with strategy at all. I can do my turn regularly under 10 seconds, just because the game is close to 100% predictable. It doesn't even really matter what cards the enemy is drawing, because you can play by the simple rule: kill all that hits the table, then play all you can. Once you understand that, the game becomes dull and repetitive. Your "strategy" doesn't matter, because there is simply no strategy in this game beside picking the right cards in the deck-builder, which rank between useless and obviously OP, and very often proof that the game-designers have close to no experience in the TCG-business.

And then the game is 100% pay to win. I've been playing countless games, where I played my cards close to flawless against opponents who clearly lacked skill. But then one legendary hit the table and I lost. There was nothing that could have been done to prevent that and nothing that could have been done to solve it, except for giving Blizzard my money to buy my own legendaries. But paying for a such a crappy game that gets boring so quickly that you drop it after 2 weeks top? No thanks.

I1. It's pay to win. People who spend more money can get more cards, better cards, more options to build better decks, meanwhile people who don't spend money need to grind for days to get even 1 deck of cards, and the pitiful rate of 1 gold per win. Even the MMR system cannot fix this unfairness at the top of the MMR curve, where high MMR players with bought cards have more than 50% win rate (like SC2). A person with 2000 skill rating + $100 spent is better than a person with 2000 skill rating. It's unfair. People should not be allowed to buy cards with real money.

First of all, it's not true that it takes days to get a deck. You can do dailies for 40-100 gold a day and you get 10 gold for 3 wins, so you can easily get a deck per day (on average). Second, this is a CCG. That means you buy cards to play with. You're not familiar with Magic: the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc? So this is just like every other cardgame, except: YOU CAN GET EACH AND EVERY CARD WITHOUT PAYING A DIME! Try that in MtG and the likes...

2. There is no release wipe. It allows people who, by dumb luck, have been in the beta to get an unfair card advantage, for absolutely no reason. Why should beta testers get to keep their account without a wipe, when people who weren't lucky enough to get into the closed beta are systemically and unfairly, of no fault of their owned, denied this advantage of early access? And some of these people are now defending their undeserved entitlement, which they should not get, at the expense of destroying fairness for everyone else.

True, it's a tad unfair that people get to keep their cards. On the other hand, it would be completely unfair to perform a wipe for people who bought cards with money. They'd have to be reimbursed and can then buy all the cards again anyway.

3. No ladder and ranking system. No plans for ladder and ranking systems.

What? There is ladder and ranking system. No sure what you mean by this.

4. No chat. No social features. No plans for chat, no plans for social features.

Other then the simple emotes that we have, that's true, about the chat. And thank God for that! Are you forgetting the toxic community of WoW? Especially in PvP? I don't need my opponent swearing at me all the time, because he's losing. I don't play a card game for the chat. I have Skype for that. And can't you chat with people on your friendslist? That would work. No social features is nonsense. You can befriend people, even see them (and chat?) when they're in other Blizzard games. You can even see your last opponent after the game ended, so you can add them to your friendslist if you want.

5. Flawed reward model that rewards players for tanking their rating and farming noobs by giving these abusers more gold, more quickly.

Wut? Didn't you just make the argument that you get 1 gold for a win and that's not enough? Yet you claim it's already abused? And you can't farm 'noobs', as you'll rise in ranking, so you'd need to lose a lot as well and even if you do that, there is nothing to gain at lower ranks. You don't get more gold or anything.

6. Per-usage microtransaction of $2 to play Arena. This would be as outrageous as Valve charging $2 to queue All Pick in Dota 2. Or if Microsoft charged $2 to make an Office document with no option of buying Microsoft Office. This is arguably the most greedy business model in existence.

Or gold, which you get for free. And if you win (if I remember correctly) 3 games, you earn as much gold as you spend and you can keep doing Arena essentially for free.

The fact that cards can be grinded at a snail's pace changes nothing, because other people who have spent more money still have the advantage of more cards, better cards, more choices, and a easier ability to adapt to a changing metagame, which isn't possible via grinding.

That changes everything. Every other card game out there makes you buy cards to play. You don't even get a basic deck for free. And don't try to compete with just the basic deck that you bought, because you will be obliterated by people who bought cards for years. This is the only one where you can get ALL cards for free. Not just a basic set or anything, but ALL of them. You just don't understand what kind of game this is.

That changes everything. Every other card game out there makes you buy cards to play. You don't even get a basic deck for free. And don't try to compete with just the basic deck that you bought, because you will be obliterated by people who bought cards for years. This is the only one where you can get ALL cards for free. Not just a basic set or anything, but ALL of them. You just don't understand what kind of game this is.

Have you ever played any flash CCG game ? This concept is the base of almost every single one of them. Any card can usually be obtained without paying, but if you don't, you have to spend your life on endless grinding in the game. To keep on my last post comparison, Tyrant is the exact same. There are multiple currencies in the game allowing you to get different packs of cards, all of these can be obtained directly in game without paying anything, that's just way slower. That's still pay to win. Just a simple question (already asked few posts above): do you think selling heroic SoO stuff in WoW wouldn't make the game unfair and p2w, because it's also obtainable for other players ?

People need to feel they don't "have to" pay, this is exactly how p2w games binds people to them. You don't want to leave a game where you spent countless hours trying to get something, while people often have no problem leaving a game on which they paid right at the beginning for an advantage.

And for your first point, I guess you mean card pack, not deck, a pack is 5 random cards, a deck is 30 cards matching together.

Sorry, But it is still far from an mmo game...
I haven't seen the news about Football manager or Civilization on the frontpage either.

Alright doof, MMO Champion is owned by Curse. Curse also owns Hearthpwn.com...Curse in general advertises, or shows off Blizzard products on both of these websites. Diablo stuff also makes it on the front page. Curse wants people to visit their websites.

The Arena is not Pay to win , if you get good enough you can play there and earn cards easily and no one has an advantage its just luck of the draw.

Hearthstone is built for every player in mind.

Play constructed for serious play

Play unranked for fun play just to do your quests and slowly build up your collection

Area for the pure RNG and skill of the draw to build your collection.

The only reason people feel its pay to win is because everyone wants to be competing against the best straight away because they have no patience.

Arena is lottery, constructed is "pay to get legendary and win"(or wait some months and gather cards to stand a chance).

It's worth a try...but after a week you have seen all of it. Don't expect any strategical depth in it or you'll be disappointed. It's really just "play cards to draw more cards and survive long enough till you have the right legendaries in your hand and kill the opponent".

Those starter decks from Trump seem outdated to me, does anyone know if he'll eventually update it any time soon?

I'm looking at the warrior list (my main class) but why would you use 2 Bloodfen Raptors as your 3/2 minions if you can get minions like Knife Juggler and Fairy Dragon? And the deck uses 2 Novice Engineers while they got awfully nerfed

Hearthstone is a fun game but I think I'll give it a miss till launch.

Monetizing a beta doesn't sit well with me. I think it's a incredibly bad business model for consumers and don't want to see it in the future, it's the same reason why I don't purchase Early Access Alpha games.

The worrying thing is I appear to be in the minority on these kinds of issues.